The Most Important Thing
by leannelliott
Summary: There are a lot of takes of Harry and Ginny reuniting after the Battle of Hogwarts and this is mine.  Harry doesn't know where to begin, so he begins somewhere else entirely. One-shot, pretty fluffy. R&R if you want.


Harry headed back down from his dormitory to the Gryffindor Common Room. He had killed Voldemort mere hours ago, and had ate and slept for a few hours before waking up in a cold sweat from a restless sleep. Harry found himself still in a state of shock, craving more sleep, craving escape, but he had snuck a glance at the Marauder's Map and seen the dot marked Ginny sitting alone downstairs.

It was the same dot he had ran his finger over so many times in a lonely tent in the wilderness, stuck on an awful Horcrux hunt. It was the same dot that had caused him a searing pain of longing in his chest, a burning desire to dissolve through the parchment to her side. And now, he realized with a jolt, he didn't have to resist his longing anymore. This time, he could dissolve into the parchment, by simply going downstairs.

Before Harry realized what he was doing, he had tucked the map away and was descending down the spiral staircase into the common room. Harry's breathing quickened, but he tried to take a deep breath and compose himself. Ginny lay curled up, catlike, on the couch, her eyes closed, but Harry had a feeling she wasn't sleeping. She had changed into clean robes, but her face was smudged and weary, and her bright red hair that spilled across her shoulders was tangled and dirty.

She was more beautiful than ever, he thought.

Harry sat down next to her. "Ginny," he whispered.

Her eyelids flickered open immediately, as he expected. "Harry."

And then Harry realized he did not really know where to begin. She didn't know about the Horcruxes, about the Hallows. He should apologize about leaving her for a year, about not explaining anything, about pretending to be dead, about Fred. Except he couldn't really say any of that, not right now. He didn't want to think about any of it. He didn't want to explain yet, he wasn't ready to relive the past year. Harry really just wanted to hug her, scoop her into his arms and press her to his chest and hold her, forever. But that was a more reckless idea than kissing her in front of the entire Gryffindor house last year. How would she react? Would she back away? Was she angry with him for leaving her? Was she angry - about Fred? A stab of guilt, of sorrow, panged Harry's chest as he remembered the ghost of a last derisive laugh reflected in Fred's unseeing eyes, though the grief had yet to pervade him. He knew it would come, but right now, he could only think of Ginny, lying here. He knew she would never forgive him. Harry would never forgive himself.

"How are you doing?" he finally stammered, realizing she had been waiting expectantly for at least a minute while he was lost in his own thoughts. It didn't occur to him that she might have been lost in her own, too.

"Oh, fine, thanks for asking," she responded harshly.

Harry's heart froze. His mind immediately plunged into the task of casting around ways to apologize, ways to explain. "Listen, Ginny-" he began, with no clear idea of where he would continue.

But then her face split into a smile, the smile Harry had missed so much, and Harry found that he didn't need to continue. "How are you doing?" she inquired, in a voice filled with fatigue and genuine concern.

"Oh. I'm - I'm alright," Harry answered weakly. Then he suddenly had a pressing desire to tell her something, something that seemed weirdly important all of a sudden, now that everything was over. An image from the previous day swam in front of his mind, not Voldemort's taunting eyes nor dead corpse, not anyone's dead bodies, not the misty figures of his parents, Lupin, and Sirius in the forest. Harry grinned in spite of himself. "Listen, Ginny, I have something important to tell you."

Ginny raised her eyebrows. "Oh, really? I think you have a lot of important things to tell me."

"No, but this is really important. Ron and Hermione kissed."

"WHAT?" Ginny sputtered, sitting upright, her hair flying. "About time! When was this?"

"Oh, just in the midst of the battle," Harry chuckled.

"Well, finally. Which one of them got the guts?"

"Hermione-"

"Oh, not surprising."

"-after Ron said something nice about house-elves."

"Did she really," Ginny mused, chuckling as well. "Well, they waited long enough."

"And so did we," said Harry, before he really knew what he was saying, and before he really knew what he was doing, he had one arm around Ginny's neck and was kissing her, and she was kissing him back, and it was simply the best thing in the world, after such a long time apart.

Reluctantly, eventually, they drew apart, and Harry stretched out on the Gryffindor common room couch, and Ginny laid down with her head on his lap, and they promptly fell asleep, feeling happier than they had in a long time.


End file.
